Three weeks after I turned 14, my mother married a guy who was 21. Pete. She told me all about it. His parents were against it. She tried to dissuade him. “I could never marry a Catholic,” she told Pete when he proposed. They were parked at a necking spot, and Pete pulled off his scapular necklace and threw it out the car window.    

     She was always partying with high school boys. It just seemed normal to me to live in a house where my mother was a motorcycle biker gang momma. She rode a 500cc twin cylinder Triumph Tiger 100. Her boyfriends all rode British motorcycles: BSA, Triumph, Norton, Vincent Black Shadow.

     She had contempt for American-made Harley-Davidson motorcycles and their riders. British bikes broke down a lot. Ma figured that a guy who can keep a British bike running was probably a good enough mechanic to help with projects around the house.

     Our home off Twelve Mile Road in a suburb of Detroit was the clubhouse for the bikers. Ma had an income of $390 a month child support money and she used it to keep the bikers supplied with beer and so what if I had to go shoeless, I didn’t deserve shoes.

     It was an abusive home but I didn’t know it. The home situation didn’t seem terrible. I kind of enjoyed the ruckus. It wasn’t abuse in the usual sense, I wasn’t tortured or raped. I was ignored. Neglected. My five sibs and I were feral children. It wasn’t just that there was hardly enough food on the table, or that we were left alone a lot, but that nobody cared what we did.

     The bikers never got out of control at the house, the police never had to be called. We had a very good stereo system that my father bought, and the biker boys and their girlfriends brought over the latest 45rpm hit records. Elvis was still too risqué to appear on TV, in those days, but we had all his records.

     Pete was new to Ma’s biker gang, a friend of Ken, one of her former guys. Ken let me shoot his .22 revolver once when I was 8–I was surprised because it wasn’t a six-shooter like on TV, it was a nine-shooter.

     Pete was fresh back from a tour with the Air Force, where he’d received a dishonorable discharge for multiple rapes. He’d been stationed at Wheelus Air Base in Libya and he and some buddies had a habit of riding motorcycles out through the desert to remote towns and bestowing themselves onto local women. When he got caught, the incident was hushed up due to the international situation and he got out of it with nothing more than the dishonorable discharge. Ma’s gang thought it was a cool way to get an early out from military service. It was the days when every man was subject to the draft. Not even Elvis could get out of it.

     It wasn’t much of a gang. No colors–no jackets, no name for the group. Just young motorcyclists who liked hanging out at Ma’s house and partying. They all wore t-shirts with the pack of cigs rolled into the sleeves, they all had rolled up pant cuffs which they used to tap their cigarette ashes into (over their engineer boots). And, of course there was a lot of oil stains on the furniture from all the Brylcreem the young studs applied to their hair.

     Every year we went to the Jack Pine Enduro 500 race in backwoods Michigan. A camping trip for us kids. It wasn’t a spectator event–it took place in the woods. Competitors had to cross the Rifle River. One year, Pete had an accident at the Jack Pine.

     He was hot-shotting around on his BSA Gold Star and a car unexpectedly stopped in his path and he had to lay the bike down and he crashed against the car. He ended up with an astonishing bruise on the right-hand side of his body from his shoulder down to his thigh.

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     I don’t remember much of anything about my early life with two parents in the house. My father was away all day at the art studio. He had a drawing board at home, too, one with a glass plate in the middle with a lamp underneath: a lightboard to make it easy to trace things with your pen. Plus a swing-arm lamp with a magnifying glass.

     If Pop was home, he was working at the drawing board. He drew words. Today if you want a bigger headline you just select the text and hit a control and bump it up to whatever size you want. Back then, if you wanted type of a size different from the metal fonts in the font case, you had to draw it from scratch. Pop was a lettering man.

     I hardly even noticed when he left. He played softball three nights a week in the summer and his team was among the top-ranked in the fast-pitch league. He also bowled several nights a week, and played golf on Sunday whenever he could. And he worked long irregular hours at his job because of the demands and pressures of the automotive advertising industry. So he was always away from home.

     Eventually I realized I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Ma was ironing and I was playing with a toy car under the ironing board, and I asked her “Where’s daddy?” and she said, “He went to Chicago.” I didn’t know what Chicago was. It was just her automatic lie.

     We were the first family in the neighborhood to get a divorce, and it was a huge social stigma back then.

     Today divorce is tra-la-la, everybody gets divorced. It was rare back in the early 1950s. Divorce was almost unknown among the proles. It was a long and difficult and expensive process and it was movie stars who got divorced, not us plain people in the street.

     So my sibs and I were shunned. We don’t want you playing with those Campbell kids, stay away from them. Parents in the better families forbade their children to associate with us and we were forced into friendships with the underclass if we were to have any friends at all.

     The first guy who moved in with us after Pop left was Leon, “Frenchy,” who rode an Ariel Square Four motorcycle, a British bike. He was a carpenter. His riding leathers were a wool-lined full body leather flight suit left over from his days in the Army Air Force in WWII. I remember the smell of the leather from when I was riding behind him on the motorcycle.

     The house became the hangout for Leon’s motorcycle buddies for the next few years. Then he faded away and Ma began a stream of brief boyfriends.

     The next one was Bill MacIntyre. Bill was wounded in the Korean war: he showed me the four machine gun scars from his right leg on up his body to his head, each the size of a quarter. He had a metal plate in his head.

     Bill McIntyre “suicided.” During a Teamster’s Union strike at the Cedar Point amusement park, he was a foreman for a scab crew. The cops found him dead in a motel sitting in a chair with a .22 pistol in his right hand and a .45 slug in the wall next to his blown off head.

     The boyfriends usually lasted an average of less than one year apiece, each motorcycle bum younger than the previous guy. Leon, Bill MacIntyre, Lucky, Cowboy, Cunningham, Terry, Pete. There were others but I don’t know which ones were just hangers-on for the free beers; Ma spent my father’s child support money on beer for her boyfriends. First things first, after all.

     Terry was there for a couple years. When I started seventh grade I discovered his younger brother Jim was in my class. I guess I hadn’t until this moment realized how creepy that was…my school pal’s older brother, barely out of high school himself, was my mother’s steady bang.

     Ma liked ’em young. One time she had to give me a ride to junior high because I’d sprained my ankle in gym class and I could barely walk. Ma was afraid people at the school would see the two of us together. She told me that if anybody asked who was that in the car, I was to say it was my older sister. Not my mother.  

     We got to be very friendly with Terry’s parents and family. Spent a lot of rainy afternoons at their house and listened to stories from Terry’s Grampa who played CLUE with us. We never saw Terry and Jim’s dad–he owned a bar in Detroit. Terry’s Dad got murdered in his bar several years later.

     Greene, I almost forgot about him. He had a .41 revolver and he showed me how he kept it loaded with .410 shotgun shells. One night the party ran out of beer and nobody had any money, so Greene hopped on his ride and came back soon with a case of beer.  It turned out he had gone over to Woodward Avenue and robbed a motel, and eventually went to prison for it. But hey, they had beer tonight!

     Ma’s pals were illiterate oafs. I was reading at a college graduate level by the time I was ten. I don’t recall exactly when I began reading adult literature. I don’t mean “adult” in today’s sexual term, I mean the newspapers and magazines that responsible adults read to keep abreast of the news. For my 10th birthday I asked for a crystal radio, and by heck that’s what I got. It needed no batteries, you just stuck the earplug in your ear and connected the alligator clip to a heating pipe or some other ground, and turn the dial and you could tune into dozens of different radio stations, especially at night.

     I liked a late-night international news network, Monitor, and listened intently as Soviet tanks crushed the attempted revolt in Hungary, just a few days after my birthday. I’ve been entranced by radio news ever since.

     The stations you could pick up varied from night to night as various weather and solar and electromagnetic effects modified the ability of radio waves to propagate. From suburban Detroit it was easy to pick up stations from Chicago, New York, West Virginia (WWVA), New Orleans, Iowa. I listened to the 1959 Go-Go White Sox win the American League pennant and go to the World Series on my crystal radio through a station that re-created the play-by-play from teletype reports, including sound effects, as seen in Kevin Kostner’s BULL DURHAM. It was so much fun to follow a team that was winning instead of the sub-mediocre Detroit Tigers.

     Nobody else my age listened to news radio at night. All the other kids listened only to local radio stations that played the new rock and roll music. Top-ten radio and we kept track of the ratings, it was important if one of our underdog favorites made it into the top 10. Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the Flying Purple People Eater, Alley Oop, the Everly Brothers.

     By this time we were virtually destitute. We survived on a $390 support check from Pop on the first of every month, $15 per week per child, and we typically starved for the final week of the month. Or at least the kids did: there was always enough to put beer on the table for Ma’s boyfriends,

     My creativity displayed itself early but it didn’t make Ma proud. None of the “Look what my kid did!” stuff. She just didn’t notice. When I was 10 I saw an announcement of a poster contest for kids sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). I bought colored construction paper and rubber cement and made several posters and won first and second prizes (my friend Richard entered one of my posters and won first prize). I won two weeks at a summer camp.

     For a class assignment in the 6th grade I wrote something about giraffes evolving long necks, and my teacher submitted the essay to HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN magazine, and they accepted it for publication and sent me a check for five dollars.

     I never understood why my mother was so opposed to my writing and drawing stuff, but now I realize it was probably because I am physically just about a duplicate of my father, and I was artistically inclined. I must have been a constant reminder of her former husband, who was now zooming into wealth after the divorce. Well, at least she could get even with him by hindering his first-born son.   

     “My kids raised each other,” my father used to say. Well, at least somebody raised us. He didn’t, Ma didn’t. They were too busy with their own lives. And it probably was my fault for being so competent that they felt comfortable leaving the kids alone as long as I was there.

     Then in December 1960 Ma married her latest boyfriend on the day after his 21st birthday. I was 14. What Ma withheld from the kid was one detail of the divorce: in the event of her marriage the house would be sold and the proceeds divided equally between Ma and Pop. We all had to move out. Pete was going to have to get a job. No more free rent.